Earthquakes: More now, or are we more aware of them?

Lately, I keep hearing this question: Are there more big events happening now than is normal, or are we so well connected through digital media that it only seems that way?

First, I’d like to point out that these ideas are not mutually exclusive. Recent upheavals in Egypt are unprecedented in our time. Even in the 1980s, the 2010 Haiti earthquake that killed an estimated 222,570 people would have been news, as would have the recent earthquake/tsunami in Japan and the ensuing nuclear panic.

What has changed is our ability to instantly charge our vision with footage on demand, our ability to donate to causes immediately, and our ability to communicate about current events. But that doesn’t change the facts.

To illustrate this, I have taken one aspect of recent phenomena that is getting a lot of attention: Earthquakes.

The yearly worldwide average for earthquakes that register between 7.0 and 7.9 on the Richter scale is 15. In 2010, there were 21 quakes at that intensity. So far in 2011, there have been eight. We’re past the halfway point in terms of the average, but we’re only four months into the year. Check out Graph 1 below, keeping in mind that the red line at 15 is the average for quakes between 7.0 and 7.9.

I want to be very clear that this isn’t some 2012, ohmygodit’stheendoftheworldeverybodyrun doomsday paranoia. There are times when there is more going on than others. That’s the reason the average of quakes of this magnitude is 15 and not eight or ten. There are years and periods when more earthquakes than average occur and years when fewer occur. Earthquakes are quantifiable. Statistics exist, making it possible to compare data year by year, month by month.

A year in recent memory comparable to 2010 in terms of earthquakes was 1995. There were 18 earthquakes that year between 7.0 and 7.9, and two that measured 8.0 or above. Still, the first earthquake measured by the USGS at above 7.0 didn’t happen until April 7 of that year, in the Tonga Islands, and there were no recorded casualties.

Earthquakes don’t have to measure above 7.0 to cause significant damage and loss of life. The reason I chose 7.0 or above is that we can easily see differences year to year. The 2010 earthquake in Haiti that claimed so many lives measured just 7.0. When this sort of thing happens in an area with a high population and poor infrastructure, the results are tragic.

It seems we measure the intensity of an earthquake in terms of the cost it may represent in human lives (see Graph 2 below). It’s not surprising that the majority of earthquakes in a given year are not international news. Many of them occur in the ocean or in areas where populations are small and remain unremarked upon.

Though the Sumatran earthquake and ensuing tsunami killed more people than the more recent one in Haiti, it’s the Haitian one we remember. Did you know that 228,802 people were killed in the Sumatran earthquake of 2004? I feel a little bad about myself saying that I didn’t, but until I started researching this piece, I didn’t. I’d love it if readers would comment on this to get a general idea of public knowledge about this earthquake.

So, the questions still remain: Do we know so much about the Haitian earthquake because of changes in the media? Is our awareness of it affected by our interconnection? Has the media changed the way it covers news in the last six or seven years? Is it Haiti’s proximity to the US media machine that made for such extensive coverage of the Haiti quake?

And there are more questions not examined here. For instance, although the Haitian quake is part of the world consciousness now, have we all moved on? Have the uprising in Egypt, the chaos in Libya, the more recent quake in Japan, and other recent events made what happened in Haiti old news? Do we stop caring when a crisis is no longer front page news? Or do we reach a saturation level that makes us look for something new?

For many, it’s easy to ignore the continuing wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and perhaps that’s because it’s been going on for so long now that people just think, “Not that again.” News is a profitable business, and websites, TV, and the print papers that remain need to be attractive to readers so they can be attractive to advertisers. We tune in and move on and there’s plenty to move on to.

As far as earthquakes go, they tend to occur in clusters. While we are going through a period with higher than average instances of big earthquakes, it doesn’t mean that things will continue this way forever. 2010 and 2011 (so far) are big quake years, which statistically means that in upcoming years, we should see fewer quakes.

So, is there more going on now, or are we just more connected? My answer is: Can’t it be both?

1

GRAPH 1: Earthquake frequency by year

The red line on the graph represents the average. There is more going on in the last 16 months than is average.

Photo: woodleywonderworks, graphic: Kate Sedgwick. All earthquake information for this article and the charts in it comes from the USGS.

I remember the coverage of the 2004 earthquake/tsunami vividly – though I may be older than you. I’m actually surprised it was as long ago as that.

http://andyhayes.com Andy Hayes

Really interesting. No I didn’t know how serious the Sumatran quake was. Loved these graphics, they really add a dimension and perspective that we don’t seem to get in mainstream media. Nice job going for the facts and not the pageview.

I’m in Australia and for me the Sumatra earthquake is far more memorable and has had more impact than Haiti. Probably because it was closer to Australia and affected many Australians, whereas Haiti affected people from the U.S. more so they remember it more.

http://www.meganeaveswriting.com Megan Eaves

Great graphs! I really appreciate being able to see hard statistics like this on graphs. I think your point about our media saturation is valid, especially as social media has made our news consumption much more real-time than ever. To answer your question, I was very aware of the 2004 earthquake & tsunami in Indonesia (the “Sumatran earthquake”) and its casualties, much more so than the one in Haiti in 2010. I was living in the U.S. when both of those quakes occurred, but for some reason, the Indonesian one really struck me. I can remember exactly where I was sitting when I first read about it, and following it closely on the news.

One reason i think we know more about quakes in recent years is because google started putting special front page messages/links about them and use of google has also gone up and up.

Paul

I have to say I’m incredibly surprised to read that you were unaware of the severity of the Sumatran earthquake. Coming from England it was all people heard about for months with so many caught up in the resulting tsunami.
I do agree though that it’s very easy to move on from on disaster to the next due to media coverage as has happened since the Christchurch quake in NZ was soon overshadowed by Japan.
Also it’s important to point out that they’ll always be a spike in large earthquakes in certain years as a result of the aftershocks that occur. Already there have been 5 quakes in Japan over 7.0 in the last month brought on by the record 9.0 quake.

THE CHAD

Nice you have only taken from 1990 if you go back further again youll notice that the last 20yrs are excessively high and staying high. Look at the whole records the century and you WILL note that this is getting worse not, and average…

vince

Dear Chad,

where can i go for an accurate reading on earthquakes for the past 100 years?

Thanks for the comments, guys. I think I may have been in the hospital during the Sumatran quake. I have no recollection of it at all and the only reason I can think of is that I wasn’t in range of TVs or radios – otherwise it just makes no sense that I didn’t know about it.

Ruby

I could not recall the Sumatran Earthquake until reading the comments and realizing it was the earthquake that caused the disastrous tsunami in Indonesia. I now vividly recall watching it on the news just after Christmas. I believe you not recalling it might be more about the name than the news coverage as it was the resulting tsunami that caused the most damage and got the most coverage rather than the earthquake.

http://100strangerstofriends.blogspot.com/ Chris

From the earthquake chart, there doesn’t seem to be any trend and like what Paul said, there are going to be peak earthquake years because of the aftershocks from very big earthquakes. In nature there’s a fair bit of natural variation.

I think one thing that has changed is that the media is much more visual now. In the 1980s, when a big disaster happened we got some photos and some tidy ‘media’ video. Now there’s a lot more visuals, people take video of events as they happen and they can quickly spread around the world. – these video tend to be more raw and rea,l so perhaps more emotionally gripping.

As with the big events in the Middle East, perhaps the interconnectivity of the world has helped to spread the unrest quicker, especially with the successes in Tunisia and Egypt.

Conversely you could argue that the 90s and 00s were quiet times in human history.

http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=1249317341 Doug Walsh

As a former geologist, I have to say looking at even 200 years of data is simply not enough. 20 years is an instant, a millisecond in geologic time. We must remember that years only make sense as a unit of time to something that lives to be 80 years old (humans). A year is 1/80th of our life, a sizable portion. A year is 1/4600000 of the Earth’s life. It’s a meaningless unit of time when tracking seismic events. Centuries would be better, and even that would be far from large enough to give it any real weight.

The other point about media/exposure is true, but it’s not all that recent of a phenomena. Even going back to the Krakatoa eruption (1880’s IIRC?) in the late 19th century, the world knew about it almost instantly thanks to trans-atlantic cables. We might look back on previous centuries and feel they didn’t know anything, but they often did.